Better late than never, but if they had been reading Jihad Watch, they would have known that for three years now. “Qaeda Leaders Losing Sway Over Militants, Study Finds,” by Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times, :

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 “” As radical Islam spreads globally through online forums and chat rooms, a group of obscure Arab religious thinkers may come to exert more influence over the jihadist movement than Osama bin Laden and other well-known leaders of Al Qaeda, a research group at the United States Military Academy has concluded.

In a study billed as the “first systematic mapping” of an ideology sometimes called jihadism, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has found that Mr. bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, have had a relatively minor influence on the movement’s intellectual foundation. Among the network’s ideologists, they have come to be seen more as propagandists than strategic thinkers.

And while the two Qaeda leaders have released a flurry of video and audio messages to their followers over the past year, the study found that the scholarly work of a group of Saudi and Jordanian clerics “” most notably Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian “” seems more likely to influence the next generation of Islamic militants.

As a result, the authors found, the death or capture of Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri would do little to slow the spread of jihadist ideology.

“It would be a blow in terms of the emotional impact, but in terms of the larger movement that the foot soldiers are being recruited into, it wouldn’t put much of a dent into it at all,” said William McCants, the chief author of the new report, “The Militant Ideology Atlas.”

The 382-page report, a kind of who’s who of the global jihadist movement, examines the most influential and widely read texts among the thousands of tracts in Al Qaeda’s online library, known as the Tawhed.

With the dismantling of the Qaeda hierarchy that existed on Sept. 11, 2001, and the diffusion of the jihadist movement into smaller, more localized cells, the Tawhed has gained new significance in helping to shape militant thought.

American officials say they fear that the next generation of terrorist attacks could be carried out not by militants trained in Al Qaeda camps but by fighters influenced by radical texts posted online….

The report found that radical Islam, sometimes called Salafism, is so deeply embedded in the Arab world that Salafis now constitute a “majority or significant portion” of the Muslim population in the Middle East and North Africa.

“Western governments have neither the local credibility nor the cultural expertise necessary to diminish the popularity of Salafism,” the study found.

Popular Categories

Robert Spencer FaceBook Page

Robert Spencer Twitter

Robert Spencer YouTube Channel

Books by Robert Spencer

Jihad Watch® is a registered trademark of Robert Spencer in the United States and/or other countries - Site Developed and Managed by Free Speech Defense

Content copyright Jihad Watch, Jihad Watch claims no credit for any images posted on this site unless otherwise noted. Images on this blog are copyright to their respective owners. If there is an image appearing on this blog that belongs to you and you do not wish for it appear on this site, please E-mail with a link to said image and it will be promptly removed.